Lauren Barnes was a masters student at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies, while she participated in the 2021-2022 Hoover Institution Student Fellows program under the mentorship of Dr. Simon Ertz. Barnes primarily studies Taiwan and is interested in the intersection between literature and history.
By Lauren Barnes
As a participant of the Hoover Student Fellowship Program during the 2021-2022 academic year, I worked primarily on three projects for the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. My first project was related to archival work. The Library & Archives has always collected at a much faster rate than cataloguers could organize and properly describe materials. Thus, when presented with several boxes of unorganized materials from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, I was happy to lend a hand organizing and describing them to help ease the cataloguers’ burden. My next project was related to the Chinese rare books in the Hoover East Asian Vault. While the majority of Hoover’s materials in East Asian languages were reallocated to the Stanford East Asia Library twenty years ago, several thousand exceptionally rare books in Chinese and other East Asian languages remain in Hoover’s collections. From among them, I chose to study a book written by Chiang Kai-shek regarding his designs to utilize the Chinese Youth League as a propaganda arm of the Kuo Ming Tang.
My final and most extensive project is perhaps most apropos to our modern day world in 2022: an examination of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives for materials relating to the 1918 Flu Epidemic. During my research, I discovered how the 1918 Flu, perhaps more famously known by the misleading moniker “The Spanish Flu”, had a profound effect on turn-of-the-century life. Scientists are still uncertain where the flu originated from, but they are fairly certain it did not come from Spain. The 1918 Flu is estimated to have killed between 50 to 100 million people, affecting both the rich and powerful and the poor and downtrodden. The disease often progressed with frightening speed and killed not only members of the most vulnerable demographic groups, but also scores of young and otherwise healthy individuals.
Because germ theory and epidemiology were still in their infancy at the time, governments were initially unsure how to stop the spread and protect their citizens. Many authorities, however, launched public health campaigns in an effort to educate the public on basic hygiene. From the pages of The American Red Cross Magazine, kept in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, I learned that the Red Cross was one of the first organizations to launch a coordinated, nationwide campaign to fight the Flu in the United States. The Red Cross distributed masks throughout the country and turned warehouses into makeshift hospitals. In addition, the American Red Cross donated to other countries in a global effort to help defeat the flu.
Although World War I occupies a stronger place in historic memory, the 1918 Flu had a tremendous impact on the world. Seemingly, no aspect of daily life was unscathed. Not only did millions of people lose their lives to the disease, survivors suffered from long-term effects as well. Still, the 1918 Flu Epidemic had perhaps one silver lining. Many modern historians believe the epidemic exposed weaknesses in public health safety nets at the time, which led many countries to reform health care and lay the foundations for more modern, comprehensive public health systems available to all. Those interested in reading and learning more about the 1918 Flu and the traces it has left behind featuring materials from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives can find my complete article here.
